From The Editor | April 20, 2010

Roadmap 2010

By Gennifer Biggs, security, storage, and managed services editor

With a new release slated for May 2010, Autotask unveiled some of the features coming in the next few weeks. Included in those are allocation codes that are now work type codes that help further automate billing, new security levels set by user access policy, VARstreet integration, opportunity searches, copy and paste quotes, and web services. The goal, says Joe Rourke, director of product management, is to include improvements from the start of your process (tickets/tasks) to the finish line (billing).

Director of Product Innovations Pat Burns also walked the gathered Autotask partners through the vendor's roadmap for Taskfire, the Autotask help desk ticket management software product built for deployment in the customer's environment. The new Taskfire release is slated for Q3, and will include the capability to conduct integrated, automated surveys, time entry improvements, and several automated steps that replace manual processes throughout the software.

Coming next? In response to requests from the partner community, Autotask is now tackling contract exclusions that allow users to specify what is covered by each contract and what contract to use among other improvements that allow greater flexibility. Also, the vendor will be extending its browser agnostic approach to include Firefox, Chrome, and more. One of the biggest cheers came with the announcement that time entry will now bridge midnight – simple, but hey, sometimes it's the simple steps. Lastly, Burns rolled out a sneak peek at an update to LiveReports – more speed and scalability, personalized templates for reports, and a scheduling engine that allows partners to email reports automatically to customers.